Month: August 2021

Contradicting the Lord

eejoseph, , , , ,

Leader says “you can’t”, the people say “we will”

Joshua 24:19-21 lays out the hard facts about serving God.


19. Then Joshua said to the people, “You will not be able to serve the Lord, for He is a holy God. He is a jealous God; He will not forgive your transgression or your sins.

20. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then He will turn and do you harm and consume you after He has done good to you.”

21. The people said to Joshua, “No, but we will serve the Lord.”

Exodus 23:25 is a conditional statement about sustaining life and guaranteeing health.

But you shall serve the Lord your God, and He will bless your bread and your water; and I will remove sickness from your midst.

Ruth 1:1 establishes famine in the land
Now it came about in the days when the judges governed, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and his two sons.

Nehemiah 5:3 reports famine
There were others who said, “We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards and our houses that we might get grain because of the famine.”

They should all be alive today if they had served (had not forsaken) Yahweh.

Giving God the credit

eejoseph

When we read something that appeals to us we are often eager to apply its benefits to ourselves.  We even pretend that we have invented a new thought or maxim, unaware that a hundred souls may be gobbling up the same messsge with varying expectations and emphases.  The one thing that rarely occurs – I know from experience – is that we give the credit to the Holy Spirit for opening that particular window into God’s heart.

Exegetes beware!

Even if the Biblical kernel is combined with an observation in nature a Messianic significance is necessary or the exercise is futile. How likely is a reader to look under rocks (in the text) without seeing them? How often does a sentence or verse appear in glorious maturity with the Cornerstone in place? The number of people finding light from a gold plated Ten Commandments box is equal to the crowd that walks around picking up gold nuggets that are strewn everywhere. No mining is necessary! Consider that and meditate before beginning a message run without giving credit to the One who hid the gold in the first place.

The providential incidental

eejoseph

Why did the God of Jacob keep saying “Here I am” to a nation that does not call on his name? So what was all the tabernacle and temple activity about? 

Permitted Discovery
“I  Myself to be sought by those who did not ask for Me; I permitted Myself to be found by those who did not seek Me. I said, ‘Here am I, here am I,’ To a nation which did not call on My name.

Isaiah 65:1

Question gallery

  • How shall Yahweh admonish a perfect woman?
  • To what does Yahweh compare the incomparable woman?
  • She wants comfort without contrast?
  • Is not her ruin too big to be unseen?
  • Who is the specialist for her disease?

How much worse can a lament get?
How shall I admonish you? To what shall I compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem? To what shall I liken you as I comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion? For your ruin is as vast as the sea; Who can heal you?

Lamentations 2:13

What a childish game the prophet was shown!

The Fix-it God, Part 2

eejoseph, , Leave a comment

It is an absolute riot that regenerated people spend practically all their inheritance on seeking solutions to problems, which are, admittedly, resolvable by a mere word, or by mustard-seed-sized faith. One person prays in the common language, another prays in tongues. One fasts in expectation of miracles, others rejoice in the sad circumstance, confident of God’s love and guidance. Another utters decrees which cannot possibly be fulfilled because they claim to do things that belong only to Christ and are only released by Him at the parousia . Some dance and whirl, others make a noisy and repetitive display. They stomp their feet and clap their hands. All the while they are claiming to be God’s children and agents, but in the absence of solutions one does not have to imagine God shaking his head in dismay. In what sense is this either deliverance or edification? Do people not believe that God is their Ever-present Help? Which part of the God-with-us reality do they not want to embrace? Is God’s precious love absent when we think we have a problem?

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? (Rom. 8:35)

You know the answer. No-one! Not tribulation, not distress, not persecution, not famine, not nakedness, not peril, and not sword.

Are church-goers really that gullible? Or are we satisfied with the good feeling that comes from reading, singing and hearing “what’s possible”? Perhaps not.

Because faith is substance we would be negligent if we said we see results when there is no evidence of God fixing anything or everything. Is a miracle all there is to faith in the Son of God? After all the talk about what God can do, when all is said and done we should ask, “What did faith do today?”

Compared to what the 11th chapter of Hebrews reports as accomplished by faith we can say confidently “I did not see”, “there is nothing to report”, especially to the claim that all suffering is banished by virtue of our sonship and by virtue of the power to decree and declare. It is most problematic for a Christian to claim things that even Christ does not do. The kingdom of God is not “anything goes”.

Or are certain worshippers of the Fix-it God expecting us to have a faith that is not perceptible? Do they want people to just have faith? Do they have real information about what God is doing, when He will do it, and how He will do it? Prophets used to be acclaimed when their utterances come to pass, and they were in dire straits for being found to be false. Gospel ministers should subscribe to the same standard.

This kind of riot helps us along the road to unproductive fields. There ought to be a manifestation of honesty and clarity about God’s interest in our daily lives in addition to the long-term issues. To be sure, Christ did not promise you that He will remove your challenges and disabilities. You are mad and misguided if you, a child of God, go to church for a miracle sideshow, ritualistic prayer, and dead-end faith.

Lock your brain onto God’s grid! If the things we call problems are not problems to God why do we bother people with our fix-it routines? Since the things we typically call problems – tribulation, not distress, not persecution, not famine, not nakedness, not peril, and not sword – are not problems to God why bring the matter up as if we can be the fix-it guy? After all, are not these miracles part of the atonement?
A huge amount of Christian credibility is on the line every time we declare things that do not appear. When God said “Let there be…” there was. When Christ said “Your sins are loosed” they were loosed. When he said “Lazarus, come”, Lazarus came. You get the picture.

Fix-it or deliverance ministries ought to be just that. They ought to deliver people, not harass them with rituals and useless manifestations. They ought not to burden the sufferer with guilt about his or her little faith, for if a little faith and just a touch of the Saviour’s garment can do wonders why are we taken in by long prayers, fasting and healing services?

May God protect you the next time you go to church and encounter one of these fix-it agents. Let your faith be on the God who is with you, the God who hears your cry, who knows what you need, and who is taking care of you, no matter where you are or what you are going through. Our great God and Saviour is most certainly a healer, surgeon, and yes, we can say it, a fix-it Person who does much more than fixes things. He fixes people by transforming them.

Grace is greater than all our shortcomings!

Elbert Joseph, PhD

The peace saturation and extraordinary intersections of life

eejoseph, , ,

Wanna see people jump up and dance? Talk about love given, extreme and unique.  For believers in Christ the path is quite clear.  Loving God will need to have tracks that run between the people in our community or circle, otherwise we could earn the rating of liar.  Love is the bond of maturity but it is not everything, neither is faith or hope, even though the three complete what we can call a stable platform for the Christian life. The spokes of other virtues may also be seen in their various dimensions as seeping into the intersections of our relationships with God and others.  While we are called believers (people exercising faith), we are not called lovers or hopers,  but the Lord Yeshua designated his disciples peacemakers, at once defining our justification, identity, and transformative powers of extraordinary dimensions.

Love is not everything

If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.

1 John 4:20

Peace beyond human/world capacity and  comprehension

Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.

John 14:27

The intersection of gospel and peace

Even the people talking peace are beautiful

How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace and brings good news of happiness, who announces salvation, and says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”

Isaiah 52:7

If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.

Romans 12:18

Ephesians 6:15 establishes our journeys, long or short, as peaceful (peacemaking?) ventures, “having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace;”

There’s no point to explaining peace’s value. It is a life experience that words do not convey because the human mind cannot grasp its dimensions or its river-like motion means. We are truly incapable of containing it.

And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:7

Even the wisdom perspective settles for peace as the flavour of every path.

How blessed is the man who finds wisdom And the man who gains understanding. 13) For her profit is better than the profit of silver And her gain better than fine gold. 14) She is more precious than jewels; And nothing you desire compares with her. 15) Long life is in her right hand; In her left hand are riches and honor. 16) Her ways are pleasant ways And all her paths are peace. 17)

Proverbs 3:13-17

Peace defines our justification.

Our relationship with God the father is described as a state of peace. Paul understood that Christ came to bring people into a healthy relationship with God the Father.

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,

Romans 5:1

For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall,

Ephesians 2:14

He, Christ, is our peace, our Shalom, our well-being. Considering that shalom is also a greeting we find ourselves hemmed in by peace’s values even when we say a simple hello.

The Fix-it God, part 1

eejoseph, , , , , ,

The Fix-it God idea is characterized by approaching God primarily as the One who addresses human problems by fixing them. This is the popular and time consuming proposition and practice of those who encourage believers to approach God exclusively on the basis that Messianic salvation is not only salvation from sin but that He has one response to human problems, namely instant and miraculous fixes. There is a Fix-it God in the Bible. The Serpent in the Wilderness narrative offers a view that God heals His people of life’s fatal bites. The snakebite healing was not salvation in the sense that humans are saved from sin, because the journeying Israelites were not unsaved persons. Yahweh had already saved the entire family of the Sons of Israel in the Exodus. The Fix-it God is therefore a picture of maintenance and ongoing healing to saved persons. We find in Moses’ narrative that divine healing is indeed on tap for the Israelites as they journeyed.

“And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died”

Num. 21:6-9

The Fix-it God delivers needed healing for those on salvation’s journey. In this mode of divine intervention the invitation to healing is “Look and live”,

And Yahweh said to Moses, Make a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall be, that every one that is bitten, when he looks on it, shall live. Numbers 21:8

One could say that salvation from sin or the inheritance of life does come in exactly the same way. It is a “look and live” proposition. For example there is the global call found in Isaiah 45:22

Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.

There is too the Pauline teaching (2 Cor. 3:18) that by gazing at Christ we access ongoing change towards the divine image. There is the prophecy of Micah (7:7) which expresses confidence in the saving power of God as one (the saved) looks to God and waits.

Is everything we call a problem a problem to God? On realizing that there are problems which are unresolvable by us and which need divine intervention, we can either find God’s answer or park our brains, set our mouth on automatic and recite all the things that earthlings and believers have ever said, looking for a way to use faith as a battering ram, when we should simply and first of all say “Amen”.

There is nothing wrong with confessing to Houston “We have a problem!” Learning to say “Amen” to wherever God places us is the right attitude setting with which we can console ourselves. We can also seek to be elevated to God’s thinking and operation, at which level we deceive ourselves with the emotional, unsubstantiated and unscriptural idea that (1) God wants to fix everything and (2) we only need to confess it or declare/decree it.

Does God face unsolvable problems?

No. Frankly, nothing is a problem to God. His healing power is not incidental. He does not rise as healer when sickness arises. Our appreciation of Yahweh as Salvation or Messiah as Salvation is our acknowledgement of the salvation that is in the godhead eternally. Our Lord’s eternal place as Son in the Godhead is inseparable from his place as pre-foundation Salvation.

Few fixes in nature and civic life

The evidence all around us is that God does not fix everything, whether we ask in faith or not. He knows every situation and condition in which we find ourselves and He chooses what gift to bestow and when to bestow it. We deny that we are related to God through and in Christ, acting as if His love must be expressed in giving us everything we ask for. His thinking, at the micro-level, is often beyond our ideas and beyond our capacity to perform. We are often not even listening to his voice.

Restoration and birth from above

What need is there in the church’s assemblies for the sentiment that there is no such thing as cross-bearing trials and adversities? No-one knows or can know the power of God in both its once-for-all manifestation and in its ongoing revelation and bestowal of a sanctified life, except through the weakness and humility of mortal life. Our only guaranteed victory is over the problem of the carnal and worldly nature.

The ultimate fix

The difference between what is possible and what is probable should not elude us. Just as the difference between the present and the future should be equally clear to all of us. The difference between what God wants and what He does is also clear – He wants all men to be saved, yet many are being lost. Since this is true for physical and mental disabilities how can it not be true for tears, death and sorrow?

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain. (Rev. 21:4)

Elbert Joseph, PhD

Sorry story

eejoseph

Those apologies are like the rubber that fears the road …

Remorse, tears, changed behaviour, pledges to comply, and expressions of guilt and sorrow are all part of the human apparatus for dealing with God’s surprising and free offer to the Jewish people and the world.

The popular and passionately declared explanations of repentance and the life that follows the saving gift of faith are woefully grace-free and thankless.

A lot of wrecked ship litter the landscape of the spiritual quest. There are among the thousands of mega church members a mere handful of the elect; one in four to be precise. For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

Do not copy without permission. All rights reserved. Elbert E. Joseph.

Eternal life is strictly a Messianic feature

eejoseph

Forever is a concept that we have trouble expressing because the future aspects of eternity are accessible to us only as foretaste, and the past aspects are revealed to us in snippets or highligjts of God’s wonders and great love. Most of us would love it if the story of eternal life contained the miraculous and power-soaked liberation of our ethnic group or nation. Not one millimetre of truth’s golden thread survives unshredded in the book of Exodus, because eternity and the human experience of it can never be achieved by a risky covenant in the hands of mortal creatures and that remains wholly a Messianic function.

John 6:51 has the primary offer (covenant or testament) of which no part appears in the books that narrate divine interventions in ancient Israel.

I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.”

No mention of eternal life exists in the Pentateuch except Genesis 3:22

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”–

The best a keeper of the Sinai covenant could expect was to be “not far from the kingdom” because priestly kingdom people were always going to lack faith, hope and love. We and our children will always be learning and reciting and never acknowledge the truth. The ungodly has the law and the just has the Father’s great love and lifegiving oath.

When Yeshua tells one of his contemporaries that he shall live if he complies with the covenant he was not addressing the life in the kingdom of God. Long life was a function of respect for one’s parents.

If you want to be accurate there are six commands (5 prohibitions and one injunction) in the path to life saying in Matthew 19.